Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

As I am fully awake and dressed, there is no reason I cannot start on these chores now. I will be happy to do them without recompense (I love the word “recompense”).

In the basement, I pull together the things I will need for this task: safety goggles, a chisel, a sledgehammer, a whisk broom, a hammer, a stiff paintbrush, boards to build forms, nails, and a plastic drop cloth (and it occurs to me now that “drop cloth” is a silly term for something made of plastic—it’s not cloth at all). It takes me three trips, but I manage to hustle all of that upstairs, out the back door, and into the trunk of my Cadillac. In the garage, I get a garden hose, a wheelbarrow (which I strap to the roof of the car), a shovel, a bag of ready-mix concrete (I am glad I always keep one on hand), and the bonding agent.

I count everything off one more time, just to make sure I have it, and then I remember: It’s nighttime. I’ll need light, too. I run inside and grab one. And that’s when I’m reminded of my fourth thought. I’m terribly hungry, not having eaten all day. I grab a package of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers out of the pantry as I pass back through the kitchen. These are not on my new diet. I hope Dr. Rex Helton doesn’t find out.

It is 11:38 p.m. and, after brushing away the accumulating snow—a potential trouble spot on this job—I have begun hammering together the wooden forms for the concrete steps when Elliott Overbay, the fat man who runs the copy desk at the Herald-Gleaner , comes outside.

“What are you doing?” he asks me. He must be stupid.

“I’m repairing these steps. You need to move. You’re standing in my light.”

“Why?”

He’s really stupid.

“As you can see, they’re crumbling. You could see that if you ever looked, Elliott Overbay.”

“I mean, why are you doing it now? Are you supposed to be here?”

I decide to answer him with a rhetorical question.

“Why not?”

“What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

Elliott Overbay is really stupid, and as much as I am enjoying this, it is interfering with my work.

“You need to go away now,” I say. “I’m busy.”

Elliott Overbay shakes his head and walks away. I really don’t like him. I never worked directly with him, but every time I was in the newsroom at night, he was really loud and obnoxious about all the grammatical mistakes he was fixing. I’m glad to see him leave.

At 11:46, I hear the door open and I look up. Now it’s Scott Shamwell walking toward me. I wonder what he’s doing out here. At 11:46, he should be hard at work on the press, getting it ready for the local run of newspapers.

“Edward, what the fucking fuck, man?”

“What?”

“I heard they shitcanned you. What are you doing here?”

“Fixing these steps.”

“It’s snowing.”

“They’re still damaged.”

“You can’t be here, bro.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t work here anymore, man.”

“That will change.”

Scott Shamwell arches an eyebrow, and just for a moment he looks like John Belushi in the excellent movie Animal House , which always makes me laugh.

“How do you figure?” he asks.

“I wrote to Mr. Withers and asked for my job back.”

“What did he say?”

“I haven’t sent the letter yet.”

Scott Shamwell comes closer, until he’s less than a foot away from me. His eyes look sad. He reaches out a big freckly arm and sets his hand on my shoulder.

“Ed, buddy, I really hope that works. But unless you get the job back, you can’t be here, man.”

I drop a board.

“Why?”

“It’s just not the way things are done. If you got hurt—”

“I’m not going to get hurt,” I say.

“I’m just saying, if you do, it will be a bad scene, man. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“I guess not,” I say.

“All right, man. Let me help you put this stuff back in the car.”

We gather up my things and dump them in the trunk. Scott tells me to leave the wheelbarrow, that he’ll bring it by my house in a few hours with his truck so it doesn’t scratch the roof of my Cadillac.

I’m about to leave when Scott Shamwell, who has on a short-sleeve pressman’s shirt and is holding himself in the cold, whistles and motions for me to roll down the window. I hit the button, and the glass recedes into the door.

“Eddie, call me after Christmas, and we’ll go out and do some radical shit.”

“OK,” I tell him.

He turns and goes back into the building at a jog. I head for home, with a right turn on North Twenty-Seventh, a right on Third Avenue, a right on Division, and lefts on Lewis and Fifth Street West before another right onto Clark Avenue, which leads me home. I don’t even care about the left turns. I’m that disappointed.

I leave the tools in the car and trudge into the house. I don’t feel very good. I don’t know what to do with my time. If my life right now were an Adam-12 episode, it would be called “Log 152: An Involuntarily Separated Employee Can’t Help Anyone.”

From the logbook of Edward Stanton:

Time I woke up today: I’m not sure what to put. After the debacle (I love the word “debacle,” although I hate actual debacles) at the Herald-Gleaner, I didn’t fall asleep again until after 1:00 a.m., and I woke up to pee at 2:14, 3:31, 4:16, and 5:27. I finally woke up for good at 10:22, when the phone rang.

High temperature for Thursday, December 8, 2011, Day 342: 26

Low temperature for Thursday, December 8, 2011: 13

Precipitation for Thursday, December 8, 2011: 0.06 inches

Precipitation for 2011: 19.40 inches

At first, the ringing phone folds itself into the haze of my dream, a sandy vision in my head that slips away from me the moment I realize that I am awake.

I push myself off the bed and run to the extension in the kitchen wearing my underwear and just one sock, on my left foot.

“Hello?”

“Edward, thank God.”

A funny thing happens when I hear the voice of Donna Middleton (now Donna Hays, since she got married), my best friend. It’s as if my brain fast-forwards through the time that I’ve known her. I remember when she moved across the street from me: September 12, 2008. I remember when I met her for the first time: October 15, 2008. I remember that she didn’t like me, and because of that, I didn’t like her very much, either. But that didn’t last. She and her son, Kyle, became my very good friends. We had good times together. I even built Kyle a super-awesome three-wheeler called the Blue Blaster. And then Donna met Victor Hays and married him, and he became my friend, too, but later he took them away from here.

“Donna, why are you calling me?”

I realize immediately that I have said the wrong thing. The phone call surprised me.

“Please forgive me, Donna,” I say. “I had a bad night.”

Her words come at me fast.

“Edward, I promise you, I’m going to double back and ask you about your bad night, because I’m really sorry to hear about that. But can I tell you something first?”

“Yes.”

“It’s about Kyle.” Her voice is urgent.

“Kyle?”

Any vestiges (I love the word “vestiges”) of sleep clear my head immediately. My heart beats faster, and I wish at once that I were six hundred miles away in Boise right now with Donna and Kyle and not here in my stupid kitchen in stupid Billings.

“He’s been expelled. It happened just this morning. Holy crap, Edward, I was on my way to the grocery store, and I got a call from his principal, and he says Kyle can’t come back to school the rest of the semester at least. My kid! My beautiful, smart kid. I…I just…how do you even…”